February 21, 2012
News sites on the mobile web: vast room for improvement
Many news publishers focus their mobile strategies on platform-specific apps—but the mobile web may actually be more important, since a mobile website is easier to discover, link to, and share from a mobile device. Damon Kiesow, senior product manager for the Boston Globe, recently examined the mobile websites of over 100 U.S. newspapers. Here’s what he found…
In this spreadsheet, Kiesow compared the desktop and mobile websites for the top 50 U.S. newspapers by circulation, plus an additional randomly selected 53 news sites. Here’s what he found:
Automatic redirect. Some news sites automatically redirect mobile traffic to a mobile-optimized version of the site, instead of displaying the full version of the site, which then requires a lot of pinching and zooming to navigate. About 85% of news sites do automatic redirection—but 13 do not, including some major sites such as SeattleTimes.com and NJ.com.
How good are these mobile news sites? Across the 103 sites he reviewed: “Overall, not great,” Kiesow tweeted. Many were “missing content, have poor design, broken features etc.”
Activate geolocation for mobile visitors. Nearly 36% of news sites ask permission to do this, often to localize weather information. “Geolocation was noted if it occurred automatically upon site load,” Kiesow clarified. “Many offer it manually or elsewhere within the app.”
Prompt visitors to bookmark the mobile site. This is an easy way to encourage repeat visits from mobile users—yet just four mobile news sites Kiesow examined do this.
Attempted to upsell a mobile app from the mobile website. Strikingly, only one of the mobile news sites Kiesow visited do this. “A fair number of sites had links to their apps, but only one did an overlay or interstitial on site load,” said Kiesow.
He also clarified that he did not check how many of the sites offer mobile apps at all. However, it’s likely that nearly all of the larger news outlets offer apps.
Linking from the mobile website to the mobile apps is a good start, but the lack of app upsell still is rather staggering, given how heavily many news organizations have invested in building their mobile apps.
Kiesow also noted whether the desktop or mobile web site had some kind of restricted access—either “metered” (where the site requires login or subscription to view content) or has some kind of paywall. This data may be less reliable, said Kiesow: “The registration/paywall info may not be perfect, it is really difficult to figure out the business rules on many sites.”
Bearing that caveat in mind, Kiesow found that about a dozen of the desktop news sites were “metered,” while only one mobile news site was (that of the Worcester, MA Telegram and Gazette). Slightly more desktop news sites (about 20) appeared to have an actual paywall in place; compared to only two of the mobile news sites. So even though this may be a small sample, frugal news consumers might be able to save a little change by checking out news sites on their mobile devices.
Again, Kiesow’s review of these sites was admittedly quick and cursory, so some of his data may be incorrect. Still, this initial data does seem to indicate that many news outlets may be discounting the potential of the mobile web—including overlooking some basic best practices. There’s definitely ample room for improvement on this front.
The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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